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deleveraging

After five rough years, we could be on the cusp of a new economic boom. Not like the mid-1980s or late 1990s, mind you. But the odds that the next five years will be markedly better than the last five years are good, and growing better by the day.

On Thursday night, venture capitalist and DailyFinance columnist Peter Cohan went on CNBC's "The Kudlow Report" to debate whether the banking industry is at the start of a period of recovery, as Goldman Sachs claimed this week. Here's why he argued that Goldman was dead wrong.

Economist Gary Shilling, who correctly predicted the financial collapse, just released a new book, The Age of Deleveraging which explains why inflation is not what investors should be fearing, but rather deflation. Shilling also gives ten investments investors should now make.

ING Investment Management forecasts that stock markets will rise between 8% and 12% in 2011, thanks to a low-inflation, low-interest environment supported by the Fed, despite weak GDP growth. And for those looking for to increase their investment yields, they have a few suggestions.

Officially underway since June 2009, the recovery has been tepid at best. The balance sheet of the average household is still straining under considerable debt, while incomes have barely risen, suggesting that the recovery has a shaky foundation.

As investors, we often seek insight from the latest news, the most recent weekly and monthly data updates. But the underlying status of the economy is better reflected in long-term trends, and many of those show serious headwinds to future growth in the U.S. economy.

There's been a lot of chatter about deleveraging in the two years since Bear Stearns folded in March 2008, but what that means for U.S. households and the U.S. economy is rarely specified. In a nutshell, leverage means taking on debt and deleveraging means reducing debt.